Our Year’s End Homeschooling Details
A lot of parents are dreading the coming summer break.
The kids have been gainfully employed as students the past several months and the idle days of summer yawn before them with the endless question of what to do with energetic kids during the break.
I on the other hand can’t wait for summer to come. A chance to have some time to finish up some long forgotten projects and to really focus on decluttering our current home so our long awaited move is a smooth one.
Our homeschool year has about 5 to 6 weeks left. Our summer will be relative short but very welcome nonetheless.
We probably could have finished earlier but we take a day off midweek which makes our school year longer.
This year I’ve been deliberately disorganized about filing the school paperworks. Sweet Peanut has been pretty vocal about the mess I have growing.
A little background on our homeschool
We use BJU Press Distance Learning for homeschool. We use the DVD version and each subject comes with a booklet of daily worksheets. Usually I tear out the worksheets and file EVERYTHING in these ring binders.
Our daughter is only in the third grade and so far I have been using 2 to 3, 3 inch binders to coral the school year. I think it’s too much.
My Plan
This year I decided I would not remove the worksheets from the bound books. Voila! One down. And that I would use my Cinch Bookbinder to bind up the tests, and important papers from the school year.
I’m going to separate them by subject and I purchased some clear covers to bind with the whole thing.
My Look back at the 3rd Grade
This year is not over for us but I definitely have some views and ideas for how it’s gone.
I’m still loving our curriculum. I think Bob Jones covers a lot of basis for the homeschooler. I appreciate all the tips and tools to make the homeschool day your own. In the first few years I would ignore all the extras and just dive into the curriculum. I think that was a mistake because it meant I was teaching to Peanut’s strengths and making sure we focused on her weeknesses. This year I read up on how to combine certain aspects of the lessons so we wouldn’t be in school sooooo long.
This year I also took over much of the teaching so we watched much less video this year. One thing that can happen with DVD homeschooling is that, since you may relish the chance to go off and get some work done, your child will realize nobody is watching if they tune out. Even though I didn’t make it a habit to not be there when the video lessons were going on it was still enough that it was quickly apparent the Sweet Peanut was missing crucial parts to the lesson because of her inattentiveness. So, actually much to her pleasure, mom went back to being the teacher. I was surprised that she preferred this but she did and it means I can spot when we need to review something, go back to something or just move on because she’s mastered it.
This year exposed some areas we need to work on during the summer months.
- Subtraction
- Writing reports and stories
We use a summer workbook from BJU Press to bridge the gap between the summer and the next school year. It’s a worksheet a day that covers, reading, math, and some English skills. We’ve been using it since kindergarten and it really helps to solidify any areas that may not have been fine tuned during the school year.
And last but not least.
This year we got to incorporate some great homeschool products into our curriculum. I’ve especially got to try out great science programs that brought our science class to a new level. We will defintely be using some of these next year.
So that’s my look back at our homeschool year as we prepare to wrap up for summer.
